When I started out with Ruby on Rails I was using my Bluehost account to host everything but found that it was cumbersome to configure and wasn’t flexible enough. So recently, I opened an account with Linode and after a month I think I’ve settled into the right setup.

And so I’d like to take a minute to share that setup and see if I can get some feedback on it.

Quick overview: I have a Unbuntu 8.04 LTS server running Nginx with Passenger to serve my Ruby on Rails apps and hope to add Asterisk and a PHP web server (for ExpressionEngine) in the future.

To get myself up and running I followed Linode Library’s Getting Started Guide and then the Ruby on Rails with Nginx on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy) guide.

I ran into some problems getting Passenger setup, apparently I forgot to run it as Sudo, go figure.

Then I had a hard time setting it up to serve multiple Rails apps. I kept getting a 403 error and I wasn’t sure what was going on, well I found a blog post by Priit Tamboom that explained my problem and I was up and running.

Now all the meanwhile, to edit configuration files I would SSH into the server and then use VI which was terribly painful but fortunately a Node member introduced me to SSHFS for OS X which is making life much easier.

Now all I have left to do is move my two ExpressionEngine blogs over (matthewforr.com and whatsamattyfo.com) and I would like to setup Asterisk for some telephony interactive code games. All in all, I’m happy with Linode, deploying Ubuntu was easy, monitoring is easy and the price while more than I would like it pay is cheaper than Amazon.

Please leave comments about this setup or send me an email to me.

Last Tuesday as the deadline for NYCBIGApps competition was coming close I managed to finish and submit my entry, foodinspectr.com. It’s a really simple app that takes the NYC Restaurant Health Inspection dataset and makes it accessible as an iPhone optimized webpage. My end goal was to add a button that would access an iPhones Lat and Long via JavaScript and return the restaurant if the user is there.

Alas, I got an email today saying that we cannot make changes to our apps until the decisions are made so I will leave that be for now.

The app was built on a Linode box running Ubuntu 8.04, Nginx proxy’s the requests to a Mongrel’s server but I think I’ll be switching over to Passenger when I figure that out. The app uses the Tank-Engine plugin and not much else.

All in all, it was a great first project for exploring Ruby and learning how to deploy a Rails app.

Dear readers and visitors, welcome to my newly realigned website. Back when I first set out to create matthewforr.com my goal was to create a site that was professionally presentable and would convey the message that I’m available to do freelance web development on a limited basis.

Since then I’ve had a chance to learn even more about designing for the web and this fall I came across an article that talked about realigning websites instead of redesigning websites. I knew I had been unhappy with how this site looked but didn’t want to start from scratch so with that in mind I took a hard look at what I had and decided to go with what was working and discard the rest.

For starters, I had been happy with the calm blue hues and the dark background but wanted to add some grunge textures to the theme and find a ‘highlight’ color to work against the blues and grays. Furthermore, I wanted to find a way to balance elements on the page and make everything snap in together.

After some work and dropping a few elements I was able to find what I was looking for and would like to think I’ve finished for now. In the future I plan on adding a portfolio but for now I feel it’s unnecessary. If you are interested in work I’ve done please contact me and I’ll be able to provide examples of work I’ve done.

If you have any feedback I would appreciate it, please send me an email (matthew.forr at gmail.com) or leave a comment below.

Lately my most favorite webapp has been this tool created by Adobe that really helps to build an idea of what colors I want to work with.

Starting with a base color then it will produce analogous, monochromatic, triadic, complementary, compound or custom color palettes. From there I can go ahead and share my creation or download and import it into Photoshop or Illustrator. Pretty handy.

Even more so you can pursue the huge collection from the community which leads to endless inspiration.

Here’s my favorite color scheme yet Mustang 1944 http://kuler.adobe.com/#themeID/143922

Wow, Screenr. The folks at Articulate made this so easy to use. It’s simple and straightforward, does audio, requires no install and hosts the video for you. Oh and it’s free.

So what I don’t get is why it’s meant as a twitter tool? After recording a screencast it tries to post it to my twitter account. In fact, in order to use this webapp I have to let it access my twitter account. I don’t like that.

Can’t this just be a really great free screencasting webapp that also has the ability to post to my twitter account?

Also, can I pay to make screencasts that are longer than five minutes?

Anyhow, here’s a quick screenr I made for a coworker who was having a problem with thunderbird.

Now that I’ve launched this blog and I hope to post on a regular basis even if the posts are short and simple so as an easy cop out I’m going to give a quick summary of things I’ve been working on:

Baltimore Node

This past Saturday we painted one of the walls and cleaned up a little bit. Plans are in the works to build work benches and we’ll be nailing down details for a DIY Guitar Pedal workshop very soon. Putting together a non-profit is a blast.

Processing

I am halfway through Daniel Shiffman’s Learning Processing book and have created a small a small project to challenge myself. It’s a take on space invaders and while nothing fancy at this point it is providing me practice with object-oriented design. I’ve learned basic input, the usage of arrays and how to implement classes. If you want to take a look at the program it’s available here.

Moving forward I will need to fix a bug in how the bullets are counted which I’ve had no luck fixing. After that I would like to add a function to reset the state, implement levels, improve the graphics and fully document the program.

Ruby on Rails

Greatest thing since sliced bread! Actually, I’m not sure because I haven’t come to fully understand how it works.

That being said I’ve managed to get a program running on my lil Powerbook and am flow charting a program to automate a data entry task at work. When finished the program will call up an email account and download any messages, the messages come from a form that contest entries so the program will have to split the information and put it into a database. Then once a week the program will collect the latest entries build them into a CSV file and email them to me so that I can import the info into our mailing list database.

If I don’t do this then I will have to train a staff member how to copy the information into excel; writing the program seems more fun.

Web Analytics: An Hour A Day

In the past year and a half of using Google Analytics I’ve gained a solid base of knowledge to say that I know enough to use data to make useful decisions but I also know that I can know a lot more. This is why I’ve set out to work my way through Avinash Kaushik book despite how thick it is. In fact, during the introduction he points out that at about an hour a day the book will take eight months to work through.

Crazy!

Well, if you are into any of these kinds of projects, particularly the Processing or RoR ones let me know because I could use some help on both fronts!